USTheater is devoted to plays, operas, and performances, American and international, performed and published in the United States. We also are open to new plays by playwrights.
All materials are copyrighted as noted. The blog is edited and much of it written by Douglas Messerli

Friday, January 23, 2015

The
Wooster Group Early Shaker Spirituals: A
Record Album Interetation / the performance I saw as at Redcat (Roy and
Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) at Disney Hall, Los Angeles, January 22, 2015

In
the Wooster Group’s new production of Early
Shaker Spirituals: A Record Album Interpretation, it appears that the
company has, if not reached a kind of crossroads, has perhaps paused to
reconsider their direction. Unlike many such experimentally-based theatrical
companies, whose major activities included deconstructing major and minor
theatrical works, the Wooster Group have generally layered their productions of
“classical” works with technological
elements (videos, multiple cameras, radio and phonographic soundtracks, and
various other aural additions)—most apparent in productions such as Tennessee
Williams Vieux Carré, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (retitled Cry, Trojans!), and North Atlantic—or with seemingly conflicting genres, such as the
mash-up of opera and grade-B films in La
Didone. Yet they have also done several productions of American classics by
Eugene O’Neill, in particular, in which they have peeled away the layers of
literary varnish that have accrued revealing in the early O’Neill sea plays, The Hairy Ape, and The Emperor Jones a vitality that had long been lost. And it is in
this tradition, with a truly stark and unornamented “recreation” of art that Early Shaker Spirituals falls.

But here, in a new way that is not
apparent in their other works, this important American institution seems to
have moved further in a direction that questions and challenges the ironic sensibility
that seems present in some of their previous productions. At moments, the
narration almost plays with the potential of the ironic, beginning with the
male introducer (Jamie Poskin) who contextualizes the performances we are
about to encounter. Nothing that the group has already “recreated” extant
records, including Hula and L.S.D, the current recreation of
recordings made by the Shakers in 1965, 1970, and 1976, potentially might be
another “jumping off spot” for a series of reevaluations of US culture. Yet,
once the quaintly dressed women singers—Cynthia Hedstrom, Elizabeth LeCompte,
Frances McDormand, Bebe Miller, and Suzzy Roche—begin their series of 20 early
Shaker spirituals, we recognize that whatever humor exists in the work existed
already in the minds of the original creators. For the most part, these are
pure creations of love and commitment to God, based on a life of “bending,
reeling, winding, linking, and intertwining their human ways” with those of the
Holy Spirit.

Yes, a DJ like figure does play, on the
side and in back of the action, the record itself, snatches of which we can
hear after the singers have performed and which, we quickly perceive, they
themselves are listening to as they sing “along” to the original works. But
these technological additions (if, in their simplicity, can even described that
way) serve simply as markers and musical cues (how do you sing a capaella on pitch without a pitch
pipe?) rather than representing another layer between the performers and
audience. Indeed, the actors appear to be attempting to render their simple
songs in the same amateur (arising from the pleasure and love of singing rather
than a professional ability) manner as the original Shaker singers. This is
particularly notable when Frances McDormand explains the origins of one of the
songs, pausing, interrupting herself, and a retelling the story in a way that
is meant to perfectly imitate the original on the recording.

Like the starkly simple set and their
homespun costumes, the performers are clearly attempting to duplicate the
original, to create a mimetic image, rather than to comment on or given greater
significance to the original. If these figures occasionally exchange private
glances, share brief phrases of conversation and rather formally exchange
positions with each other, it is not meant as commentary as much as it is to
suggest that the Shaker originals recognized themselves as apart from the
community before whom they were performing. From our contemporary viewpoint,
these women are quaint outsiders, slightly strange. But by bridging that gap,
they are attempting, if nothing else, to communicate their values to us.
Accordingly, the Wooster Group performers are in the strange position of existing
on our side of reality, while attempting to project something other.

This is made even more apparent when, in
the second part of the program, the women gather to dance to some of the very
same songs which they have just sung. One of the major elements of Shaker
religious ceremonies, and part of the reason why they were described as “shakers,”
their dances are highly formalized combinations of hand gestures and movements
of their feet, which, given the beautiful lyrics and the rhythms of the songs,
completely transform and help to reveal that what we have aurally experienced
in Elder Joseph’s beautiful anthem to simplicity as it is completely transformed by
dance, when suddenly the “coming down,” the “bow and the bend,” and the “turning,
turning” is literalized:

'Tis the gift to be
simple, 'tis the gift to be free

'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to
be,

And when we find
ourselves in the place just right,

'Twill be in the
valley of love and delight.

When true
simplicity is gain'd,

To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,

To turn, turn will
be our delight,

Till by turning, turning
we come 'round right.

In this second portion, moreover,
the Shaker past is reintegrated with our present, as the male dancers, dressed
in modern costume, move in an outer ring which, although continues to segregate
them from the women of the past, still brings them together through and space,
the “you” being joined with the “I,” or the “them” with the “us”—as it
necessarily must be since, presumably, the dances are a respectful “re-creation,”
a stylized imaginative “reconstruction” of actual Shaker dancers, rather than,
like the songs, a faithful imitation.

In short, in presenting Early Shaker Spirituals the group is no
longer attempting to reconceive a theatrical event of the past, nor even to
revitalize it, but to respectfully reiterate it, exploring the songs and dances
for what they originally offered rather than reimagining how they might now
mean for us.

The quietude of the audience throughout
these songs and dances suggests not only a certain awe of the beautiful simplicity
of the works but represents a recognition of the distance between ourselves and
the art we are encountering. But it is just that distance, that awe of
something slightly removed from ourselves that, when we ultimately perceive it
as still having so much meaning, results in the final release of joyful applause.
If the Shakers saw it as a religious experience, today we describe that, more
often, as art.

Given the various directions the Wooster
Group has moved over its glorious existence since 1975, it would be absurd to
attempt to describe what might be expected in their future works; but it is clear
that at least some of their members have found new meaning in the original art
without needing to overlay it with contemporary innovations and irony.